[open-government] Dutch Court of Audits asks NATO to open up spending

[Ton Zijlstra]

Hi Anders, all,

The Dutch National Audit Office (NAO) is in general very positive towards
using open data as a tool for greater financial transparency. I am working
/ have worked with them in the past year as an external open data
consultant, and I am really impressed with their work ethics,
professionalism and dedication to their obligations to the public. The
NAO's president, Saskia Stuiveling, is also internally pushing her people
to do more for open (government) data and strongly backs internal
experimentation.

The NAO had 2 people at the OKFestival in Helsinki in 2012.

Their first public effort was opening up the Dutch national budget as data
in Sept 2012 (and Sept 2013) in parallel with the introduction of the
budget law at the start of the Parliamentary year.

This spring the NAO opened up their own accounting system internally to all
employees, as an experiment to
1) figure out what kind of questions, ideas, obstacles, unexpected issues,
pop up when you open the books fully.
2) provide everyone internally with a notion that opening up is worth it
and not 'scary'
3) allow all colleagues at the NAO to help find ways to fulfill the goal of
internal budget savings

They are planning, after this internal experiment, to open up their own
books to the public early 2014. They hope this will also make it easier to
push ministries to open up more. The NAO writes 'suggestions' for
ministries after checking their books, and they want to add open data
paragraphs to their audit reports, but feel they can only believably do so
if they first open up their own books. Interestingly the NAO themselves are
not covered by the Dutch Freedom of Information Act (as they are a fully
independent 'High College of State' at the same level as e.g. the
Parliament, the High Council and the national ombudsman, and get their
mandate from the Constitution directly) so they are acting not out of
obligation but out of felt necessity.

Earlier this year I did a session with them and the Ministry of Healthcare
to explore how such 'suggestions' might change if open data plays a role
(e.g. making more concrete suggestions the Ministry can actually act on),
and how with open data they could address more fundamental issues of waste
and fraude in the healthcare system, once you move past the current hurdles
of opacity.

The Dutch NAO is host to the European conference of NAO's in 2014 (and this
month to the 'youth NAO conference') (http://www.eurosai.org/), and intend
to make open data an important part of the agenda. This is also why they
would like to have some tangible results by then, to take the lead by
example.

They are now in the process of starting the 'Open Data trend report' where
they want to provide Ministries with a brief overview of good practice
examples from across Europe for them to emulate, and want to do a scan or
census of what Ministries are currently really doing in terms of
transparency (do they have a transparency policy, do they know which data
they have, are they releasing core data etc.), so they can then discuss the
differences between Ministries. This research starts in 2 weeks, and should
be finished in March. I'll be doing some work with them on this.

this as background info.
best,
Ton

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interdependent Thoughts
Ton Zijlstra

ton at tonzijlstra.eu
+31-6-34489360

http://zylstra.org/blog

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On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Anders Pedersen
<anders.pedersen at okfn.org>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The Dutch Court of Audits [Algemene Rekenkamer] released in October a
> brief proposing NATO to open up transactional level spending [1 - in Dutch].
>
>  Last week the Dutch Min. of Defense decided to back the proposal [2].
>
> A *far from authoritative* translation of one of the segments from the
> brief goes like this:
>
> "We would reconstruct and present the flow of money in the NATO
> organization on an interactive world map. The underlying data for the world
> map will be created from open information; we take the point of departure
> in the principle of *open spending*."
>
> The brief also includes mentions of the Open Government Partnership.
>
> Do you have other examples of initiatives for spending transparency at
> national or international level to share?
>
> It is finally worth noting that other Defense departments have already
> done some work in the field eg. UK and Greece. The Danish DoD has published
> at transactional level including cash payments made in Afghanistan as
> result of deployments there [3].
>
> Best,
> Anders
>
> [1]
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_dkMlz2NopEVzREYVc5bFBYS1E/edit?usp=sharing
>
>
> [2]
> http://www.rekenkamer.nl/Nieuws/Nieuwsberichten/2013/11/Minister_van_Defensie_steunt_NAVO_project_van_Algemene_Rekenkamer
>
> [3]
> https://openspending.org/statens-indkoeb/to/kontantkoeb-afghanistan/entries#to:kontantkoeb-afghanistan
>
>
> --
>
>
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